re: Bars throughout Texas have been busted selling well brands as top shelf alcohol.

Yeah but these are the kind of bars where you are drinking plastic cup drinks, made from one liquor and one mixer, to get drunk, so does it really matter?

I drink real cocktails, at bars that are in nice restaurants, so I see them make my drink a lot of the time, and when I don't, it's because I'm sitting at a table in the kind of place where they're priding themselves in their craft cocktail and certainly not trying to cheap you out.

I make my own cocktails at home as sort of a hobby, so yeah I can taste the difference. But if you are drinking the kind of drink that's just one liquor and one mixer - that's a "getting drunk" drink anyway so I don't know why you'd pay for top shelf booze to go in it in the first place. If it goes in a plastic cup, it should come from a plastic bottle - that's my rule.

So far as guys at nice bars getting scotch or bourbon neat, you can certainly tell the difference and I doubt that type of establishment is cheating their customers anyway - what we're talking about here is an "in da club" type joint or a college bar. In either case you're wasting money to buy top shelf.